Earlier this week Oliver Marks wrote an excellent post on his Collaboration 2.0 Blog: ‘The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer’ – Peter Drucker Centenary. Oliver celebrates the Nov 19, 2009 Centenary of Peter Drucker’s birth with two of his favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes: ” ‘Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes‘ and ‘There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job‘, which somehow seem to fit together very well.” then uses these quotes as context to discuss the disturbing findings of the 2009 Shift Index report and followup analysis by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Please read Oliver’s full post – you’ll like it. Oliver was also used kind words to build on my earlier Enterprise 2.0 Schism post. Here’s a slightly extended version of the comment I posted in reply, along with my two favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes and several links to celebrate Drucker’s birth and life.

I have to confess that I’ve enjoyed watching recent rounds of Enterprise 2.0 discussion and mud wrestling. The fact that so many people enjoy debating definitions, values, doctrinal principals – even the existence of Enterprise 2.0 – makes me think that E2.0 might best be framed as a religious debate. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce a new and exciting element: schism.

I hereby declare myself an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Druckerian. I believe that “2.0” should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology – which is what an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Technarian would have you believe. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking about what to write in the wake of the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. One more summary seems unnecessary, since there have been so many good ones already. And the debates are starting to feel a little trumped up and warmed over, and so less fun to wade back into. And then I got inspiration from Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software and longtime technologist. In addition to running his company Greg finds time to write a great blog, and his post after the conference was called “Enterprise 2.0 Schism.” In it, he likens the current E2.0 controversies to a religious schism, and divides the community into three sects: Strict Proletarians, who believe it’s all about the people, Strict Technarians, who believe it’s all about the technologies, and Strict Druckerians, who “believe that “2.0″ should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology…”

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

The United States, my beloved home country, has become the General Motors of nations in its lethargy and complacency. This is ironic, because the US (and Canada) own a majority share of GM, but I am focused more on economic similarity rather than ownership. The height of complacency for GM was probably about 2004. In that year the automaker still had the title as the world’s largest maker of cars, a title it relinquished in 2007. GM was still profitable in 2004 — but not very much so — and it was losing market share in many of its major markets. That was the year that GM abandoned the Oldsmobile brand, but it didn’t seem worried about its future overall.Read the rest of this entry »

We live in ludicrous times of rewarding good appearance for evil action. President Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while his war efforts intensify. But those who are true promoters of peace need attention, for they will never likely receive such ostentatious recognition for their noble efforts. Such individuals are those who take risks in a world of uncertainty, and who save or borrow capital to start a business. Such entrepreneurs promote peace by serving the customer better than the next entrepreneur through voluntary transactions in the market, rather than commanding bureaucracy in government.